Ep. 15 How to Reclaim Your Day from Constant Interruptions
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[00:00:00] Hello, welcome to the productivity genius podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Fifield. And in this episode, we're talking about dealing with interruptions. Now, if you are someone who believes they get interrupted a lot, my guess is that you find that super frustrating. And this episode, I'm going to suggest that you consider switching the way you think about those interruptions.
I prefer to think about things that other people would define as interruptions as I have chosen to switch my focus. If someone asks me for something and I decide to follow through on whatever they've asked me. I prefer to think that I've chosen to do this other thing rather than that person interrupted me.
Because if they're causing me to do something else, I have no power in that. But if I chose to switch what I'm doing, now I can control a lot more of my day. So I think the most important thing that you can [00:01:00] do, each time you believe you're being interrupted, is consider how this is actually partly your choice in what you're doing.
And I'm not even suggesting you necessarily always choose to not be, like, quote unquote interrupted to keep doing what you're doing. Just recognize that very often the things that we think are interrupting us, like those outside forces, maybe have made an easy opportunity for us to lose focus, Really, I can't think of too many situations where switching from what we were planned isn't an actual choice. So that's the first thing. I would love for you to look for evidence whenever you can of things where you believe you're getting interrupted. Try to see where your power is in that.
what are you choosing and what do you want to choose? So what this looks like for meis that when something is requested from me, I get an email asking for something or someone asks me something directly, I take a pause. [00:02:00] I am a recovering people pleaser, so I always want to do whatever the thing is immediately and just do whatever the person needs.
That's my go to natural practiced reaction.
However, since I know that about myself, I take a breath and then decide, what do I actually want to do here? Because if I decide to. Follow through on whatever they're asking me to do. I'm saying no to whatever I had planned.
I love to show myself as much respect as I can, whenever I can. Now, if I really do take that pause and still want to do that thing for them, totally fine. But I love noticing that it's my choice. They didn't make me do anything. I didn't get interrupted. I made a different choice.
So that's the first thing. When you think you're getting interrupted, pause for a moment. You might not want to actually go through and follow through on whatever that outside [00:03:00] request was.
The second thing is redefining interruptions.
I don't like to think that I'm interrupted very often. I prefer to think about interruptions as a decision I've made to change my plans, a conscious decision. Because when I'm making a conscious decision, that's within my power. When I think about it as an interruption, that's outside of me. And I like to take as much responsibility as I can so that I maintain as much power as I can.
Now, my third suggestion for you is to plan for these things that you're calling interruptions.
This might be a bit of a challenge when you're first working on scheduling, but in my week, if you look at my calendar for the week, there are just open blocks of time that just say work. Because I know from Years of scheduling that there's going to be work that's going to come into my world during the [00:04:00] week. 'cause I have bosses. There are things that are going to need to get done that I don't know about yet. And when you schedule repeatedly and for years, you get a good sense of how much time you need to leave for that upcoming probable work.
So each week I always have blocks of time scheduled for incoming work.
Now, if I get to that block of time and nothing has come in, then I get to choose what I want to do at that time. But because I've been scheduling consistently for so long, I really have refined my schedule so I know approximately how much work is going to come in each week. This is something you'll learn after scheduling for a bit.
When you're really focused on how much time you're investing in different types of activities. And you're really looking at that closely week after week after week. It's really easy to pick [00:05:00] up on the patterns and the types of work you're doing and how much time you're investing in each of those types.
Now, if you aren't great at scheduling yet, my guess is that you would think, I don't have any time to leave open spaces. But the reality is You are doing that work. You're just not planning it ahead of time So even if you just started recording what you did throughout the day you would Be able to start to see how many hours how many minutes you're spending on different tasks How much of your time is spent doing?
kind of surprise work How much of your time is doing work that you could plan in advance, and how much of your time is spent doing work that comes in during the week.
Even if the majority of your time is invested in doing tasks that come in through the week, there will still be time every week that you can schedule for yourself. I think it would be a [00:06:00] great idea to find a little chunk in your day initially, even if it's 15 minutes after work, 20 minutes in the morning. an hour at night where you schedule things to do and then follow through on them, even starting with a tiny block, like 15 minutes a day. Maybe you schedule 15 minutes a day to work on your side hustle or whatever it is that you're working on.
Those minutes add up to huge blocks of time. And by practicing scheduling it and practicing it follow through, especially on the days when you don't feel like it, you start building that muscle. You start feeling great about the results you're creating and you get that momentum. By just looking closely at how you are using your time throughout the week, you'll start to see patterns and you'll start to get a handle on how you can manage all of it.
So I'm sure you'll have lots of opportunities. Unfortunately, most of us believe we get interrupted all of the time. So [00:07:00] do yourself a favor this week. Each time you are quote unquote interrupted, take a breath before you decide, Yep, I'm going this other direction. Take a breath. What decision do you want to make in that moment?
Do you want to change what you're doing and do this new thing? Or do you want to continue to do the thing you were doing? Just noticing that you have a choice in that moment is huge.
If you can start to believe that you are choosing , the activities that you're doing throughout the day and that you have control over those choices,
you'll become more and more powerful and gain more and more control,
and you'll be setting yourself up to get the things done that are most important to you.
And speaking of those buffer time blocks that I mentioned, that's what we're gonna look at next week. Time blocking. What blocks of time should you have in your calendar? What blocks of time would be [00:08:00] fantastic? I'll give you all of my suggestions for how to block your time for maximum results. But in the meantime, I hope you have an amazing week.
